no one was paying attention. they were writing paperings, should we take the effort seriously, what is it about? we're at 90. we have a list of the people who want to be part of the problem solvers. this ising is i have never seen before in my political life. it is moving and as it moves and as it continues to meet and put forward pieces of legislation that increasingly are meaningful to the american people, that is when leadership will begin to take note and say there is a viable group that is emerging here. they are bipartisan focus on solutions and checking their anger at the door. they are thinking in terms of the next generation, not the next election cycle. they are willing to put their country before their political party. something interesting is happening here. we have gone from a clinical trial to almost a finished product and i think going into the next year we will likely get real resonance with leadership

on capitol hill. why? because we will have reached critical mass. i think that is where we are going. you have to prove the point. you have to have critical mass in order to move the market and that is where we are going to be this next year. >> this is for both of you gentlemen. with cable news, with whether it is on the left report right or the right there is a dialogue and tends it would seem to perpetuate that polarization. when do you say to an elected elected he figures when they have to go -- official when they have to go back and face a constituency. what do you say to the elected official? how will you convince that elected official that forging the compromises is not going to cost them their next election because of the polarization and the perpetration of that by both the left and the right? >> well, that is an excellent

question. for those who aren't familiar with my state's politics, as the senator mentioned richard luger served for 36 years in the united states senate in indiana. he was so popular that his last election seven years ago, we didn't run anybody against him. a waste of time, waste of money why would we do this, focus on something else. he literally was unopposed. he went from being unopposed to six year's later losing his own party's primary by 20%. and just so you know it was not as fdic luger decided to leave the team and become a democrat or aflaming a flaming liberal. he didn't vote for the affordable care act or obama care. didn't vote for the stimulus bill or dodd frank. it was other stuff. the point was here is the data

point and this is what has many people, the gerrycommander has split the house. people on the far right and far left because the districts are drawn all republican and all democrat. in the senate it is two things. the fact that no one votes in primaries which is the point i'm about to make and the role of big money. you asked me what changed. a case decided by the supreme court which allows unlimited amounts of money to flow into campaigns. here is what happened to dick luger. this was not a secret election. there were millions of dollars spent. a big election. everyone knew there was an election coming up. the voter turnout in that primary? 18%. fewer than one in five eligible republicans voted. it would be the same way if we had a democratic primary. who are the 18%? they tend to be the most partisan, the most idelogical.

people are mad about something. if we could get the voter turnout up to 40% in primaries i think you would have a little different result. right now the voter turnout is very low. the second thing is $5 million, $6 million flooded in from some of the out-of-state organizations which now enforce party orthodoxy. if you deviate one little bit you run the risk of having millions dollars worth of ads run against you. my message would be the following. you may run the risk if you do what you think is right and vote for something that you think is practical and compromise and try and move the country forward. you do run the risk of maybe losing your party's primary. that is true. but if you don't with congress' job approval currently at 9% and both parties approval ratings way low you run a real risk of losing the general election. as long as you will be there unless your objective is to sit in the chair, your best bet is

getting something done and then deal with the politics. ultimately we will end up with people care more about results than just longevity in office. i think we may be in for a series of antiincumbent elections and that will focus incumbent's mind if you are just risk adverse to avoid primaries you may lose at the end of the day anyway. take the risk regardless and at the end of the day isn't that why you are there? my father lost his last election. he was defeated in 1980 and, you know he has gone on. his life is okay. there are worst things that can happen than to lose an election. and one of them is not standing for anything. >> heaven forbid speaking the truth on the campaign trail evan. may get you in trouble from time to time but you can live with yourself later on. >> there is a real world example

of exactly what we are talking about and that would be kurt bramble. i'm not here to pander because i don't have to ask for your favors any more. if you look at what you did on immigration reform and on energy just to mention a couple and your election returns you would have to say you are probably a textbook example of what happens when you get out and try to do the right thing. drawing from a broader coalition of supporters and able to get things done in the end and you have a legacy you can look to. it is more than just rhetoric and textbook theory. some of you have actually put it in practice. you should be proud of what you have done and i know that you have put it in practice, too. i didn't mean to embarrass you kurt. i wanted to point that out as a real world example of what we are talking about. >> just a couple of minutes left. any members of the audience that would like to pose a question? we have senator ward from hawaii. gene you're up.

>> can we come visit? >> yeah, aloha! >> that is what -- hawaii is unique obviously not orange only because of its terrain but its political history consideration we have a super majority blue. i'm in the house of 51. my caucus is seven. in the senate, there is one republican and 24 democrats. what are some insightsky bring insight i can bring back. i really like the concept not because i'm in the minority. we are americans first and then republicans and then democrats. we tend to forget that and you guys are remining us of that. how do you get inside the inner psychology if you will to motivate people who had a super majority and had it for 50 years to do something about this what you gentleman gentlemen are talking about? thanks you. >> i will make a quick comment and let evan follow up. i lived in four countries.

only one of widowsen have a strategy. this one. we don't have a strategy in this country and we sort of meander along and hope we are doing the right thing. we hope the economics work out. we hope our sort of innovative spirit will keep us moving in a -- in a way that speaks to competitiveness which is what the 21st century will be about. no labels is doing a very interesting thing. we don't know what it will look like but we are put together a strategy document for the united states. it should be out maybe february or march of next year in the form of an ebook. if you were to say republican or dem,democrat, doesn't matter, we are all americans. what does the united states need to get right for us to achieve our true greatness in the 21st seencentury. there are four or five things we

have to get right. whether you are republican or democrat. if you are in a minority position you have to work with the majority. but what are the issues that you are working on? what is the strategy for the state? we had a strategy in our state that spoke to jobs and economic vitality. and we had a few things that were on our list that we just had to get done. the tax code had to work. education has to work. you had to have a electric regulatory system that worked. you have had to be fast on the dime in working with the private sector because they could take their in investment real fast. so we had our own little strategy. what is the strategy for hawaii? what is it that you must get right to survive in the 21st century and that defines what you are able to did with your legislatived about did i ann if you feigned yourself in a minority meteorologist. position.

>> are you the many many republican? >> seven out of 51 in the huhs. we are 8 out of 76. those were the numbers. >> representative, we were trying to change your dynamic. >> there is a saying in the house that the other political party is the opposition. but the enemy, the enemy is the senate. so i guess we temporarily lumped you in with the enemy. we are sorry about that. sounds like your side emphasizes quality, not quantity in the state legislature so i would take the approach, my state is a more republican state altogether. i used to tell my friends you got to vote for at least one democrat just to prove you are open minded so it may as well be me. enough of them thought that was okay. i would just associate myself

with what jon had to say. this it day and age we face a number of crises. i think the economy is not performing the way we would like. with wages, real wages have been stagnant in our country for more than a decade. think about that. at the time when the cost of college and a whole host of other things, healthcare has gone up substantially, real wages have essentially be frozen. you are all familiar with the budget problems we face. there is a growing disparity between the haves and have notes in our society and that should concern all of us over time. and all of these things are in some ways interrelated to the question of economic growth. so if i just had to pick one thing, i would agree with what jon had to say. what is our comparative advantage? how do we grow this economy in a very competitive world? and in particular, how do we empower, not just give but empower sit citizens through hard work and thrift to enjoy. so fruits of that growth. particularly the third that aren't getting the educations.

the kids that aren't getting the quality quality of education they need to be economically relevant in an innovative competitive global economy. i also suspect you are probably a little more concerned about rising oceans than we are in indiana. kind of put that on the list. but that would be my take on it. >> good afternoon. i'm senator terry bonner from minnesota. i joined new labels i think it was about two years ago. i'm a paying member of no labels. i'm a democrat representing a republican area. it has always been like that. with redistricting it got worse it is now about 60% republican. my first election was in 2005 and my slogan was uniting the middle and that is still my slogan. my margins just keep getting better. i think i hit on something that really appeals to the people in my community. and so one of my comments as you talked about your vision is i have been thinking because now there is an effort to get more

state legislators and i'm thrilled with that. now is the time and we can really make a sweeping difference. one of the things i have been grappling with is transportation infrastructure. tax reform is a federal issue as well as a state issue. immigration reform has to be tackled nationally. one thing that each of us grapples with is what we are going to do with regard to transportation infrastructure. i remember being so excited when president obama talked about his commitment to rail and that really kind of died and there wasn't a comprehensive support for that as well as other, you know, state to state initiatives. and so i'm wondering if you have a comment on the power of states uniting around transportation infrastructure and if you also see that as one of the economic drivers? i think we all know about innovation and creativity and those things as economic drivers. but if you can't move from place to place and be mobile that is

really an obstacle for our business community. >> thanks for sharing your story. i think that is absolutely awesome. i'm going to tuck that away and reflect on your comments for the rest of the day and the week and the month because you are really what this effort is all about. we now have some state and local leaders, we just did a phone call in the last two days, some lieutenant governors, secretary of state senators, representatives, mayors on the line probably numbering 300 plus and we are just getting going. we are doing this every month having a phone call and sharing ideas in the runup to next july 23 where as eastbound van said we will have the first -- as evan said we will have the first ever of its kind state and local gathering. you have flyers on your seats. be sure and read that. i know we have some no labels people here in the audience. raise your hands. talk to any of them about questions you might have. this is a big deal. on the infrastructure side, it

always seemed a little disingenuous when all of a sudden on the republican side it became a bad word. i don't know how a nation competes without adequate infrastructure. i lived in china most recently and there is an example of overbuilding. a lot of roads to no where. they had a stimulus package in 2009 that was equal to $650 billion. the largest stimulus package in the history of the world based on stimulus to g.d.p. ratio. they have overdone it. sometime take a flight from beijing into newark or kennedy. and you get a sense that we have got some work to do in this country. and it isn't republican and democrat. this is about survival and competitiveness. you have to get people around. you have to get your products around. we are still the largest marketplace in the world and still own 20 plus percent of the world's g.d.p.

a huge market. we are viable and just kind of taking off when you look at the engines of growth that might exist in the future. this is important but has to be presented i think as an economic opportunity for expansion and for jobs as opposed to the red-blue republican, democrat. msnbc/fox news. you can't even have a rationale discussion about it. keep doing what you are doing. >> time for one more question. >> thank you gentlemen for being there. senator, would you ask the panelists, dan sadler, representative from alaska. republican. i appreciate you using the bully pull pulpit. mass the know labels movement considered taking on one issue like transportation or immigration reform and fixing that problem and many label branding that as a know labels initiative and breaking the paradigm that way.

>> let's have this be the final comment from both of our presenters. >> first, you come from a great state and one of my favorite. i have twin 18-year-old boys and one of my favorite summer vacations was two years ago when we went and spent eight or nine days in alaska, fishing and hiking and doing all those kind of things. i hope you will take good care of this. the first initiative, nancy correct me if i'm wrong was no budget, no pay. it is amazing it may come as a surprise that the federal government has gone years without just stop, not passing a budget any more. finally in an attempt to -- we tried shaming people into voting and so forth and so on. finally concluded an appeal to their pocketbook would be more persuasive. said you can continue not passing budgets if you want to but you are not going to get paid. surprisingly -- or not surprisingly, both houses passed

a budget shortly thereafter. that was something to begin to make the process of beginning the budgeting in washington more responsible again. a list ofite or nine other things. it will start small and be gradual because these problems didn't arise overnight. they are not going to be curedover overnight. in budget, no pay and eight or nine other things we are proprosing that will begin to show it is not just a process it as process that can lead to tangible results. >> just very quickly. what i said earlier that you could be part of history, i really do mean that. you could be part of history. no labels to date has been about convening and building trust. that is what we have been about without advocating any issues in particular. you raised a very, very good point and it is what we within the organization are talking about. so as we go into next year, i think we will be looking more at advocating some of the big issues around what that strategy

should be that this country just must get right but your voice and this organization could be absolutely instrumental in shaping an agenda and helping to move that forward. because you have great clout on capitol hill here and with every governor in this country so we would hope that whatever we do we could work collaboratively. for us this would be making history going from advocacy are not advocacy, really a convening organization to some form of advocacy. that is on our minds and we would like your help with it. >> i would like to thank senator huntsman and senator bayh. it is interesting that both of these gentleman are putting forth the notion whether you are a liberal democrat or conservative republican we are americans first and we should be governing not grandstanding. for me personally when i was asked if i would moderate this i thought what a privilege it

would be to hear the message that they are delivering. so we want to thank them and let's give them a round of applause. [ applause ] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute] >> this concludes our lunch program. immediately following we have our business meeting and as soon as the business meeting officers are up here on we will begin the business meeting. we would ask that you all stick around so we can conclude the business of the fall forum. thank you. >> thank you senator. >> on next "washington journal" robert zarate discusses secretary of state john kerry's tenure so far.

[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] >> i am a combat vet. i sevenned in the navy for seven years before i was medically retired. i contracted a terminal lung disease in iraq. i also crushed both of my hands parts of my hands and had to have my hands rebuilt. i'm 100% disabled. i can no longer work. and my life expectancy now is down probably less than two years. my husband is my primary care giver. i don't need anything from the v.a. any longer. my complicated claim took four years to adjudicate. not once in the four years did i ever present one single piece of

new evidence. the entire claim was submitted fully developed in its entirely before i was even discharged from the navy. i'm here not to represent my claim or my issues. my husband and i are here to make sure that this panel and that everyone that will listen to us will understand that cases like my own and unfortunately like mrs. mcnutt are not isolated. i personally have dealt with at this time almost one thousand cases just in the last six months of veterans that are -- and their spouses and children who are dealing with complex claims that are being denied over and over and over again or being low balled and zero rated. >> this weekend on c-span, a house veteran's affair subcommittee hearing. watch saturday morning at 10:00 eastern. on c-span 2 book tv.

taking stock of the grand old party. joe scarborough late saturday night just past midnight at 12:15. 50 years ago as a nation grieved for a lot of president, l.b.j. stepped from vice president into the oval office. sunday at 3:00. next a symposium on for run sick genetics and how they are used in the criminal justice system from the 10th circuit bench and bar conference in colorado springs. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] >> try the experiment with the microphone. all right. okay. how is this? great. well, good morning everyone. it is a pleasure to be here with

you today. i would like to thank the organizers for inviting me to come to this very beautiful place. what i would like to talk with you about this morning, as hank mentioned, we will start with a very basic review of d.n.a. what is it? how does it work? why should you be interested in it? i will focus on an important intersection between d.n.a. and law and that is in forensic genetic is, forensic applications. and i will illustrate some of the points with case studies in which d.n.a. has been used in forensic contexts. so our body is a marvelous collection of about 100 trillion cells. and inside almost all of these cells in the nucleus of the cell

here we can find d.n.a. it is organized among chromosomes. if we look closely at the chromosome is, we see this double helix structure. the classic structure of the d.n.a. molecule. along the d.n.a., the bases a c, t and g and it is strings of the bases that compose genes. we humans have about 21,000 genes and each encodes an important component of our body. an important protein or enzyme. so we can think of the d.n.a. sequence as the bodies instruction manual. the shop manual for the human body. i will show you a little bit of sequence here. and you can't read this, this is about 3,000 bases, d.n.a. bases. a very tiny proportion of our total d.n.a. sequence. each our cells has about three

billion d.n.a.-based pairs. so what i'm showing you here is roughly one millionth of the human genome and that is our entire d.n.a.-based sequence. fy were to show you a picture like this, one every second, it would take me about 12 days to show you the entire human genome. that is the amount of information that we are looking at when we actually try to sequence a whole human genome. but that is one of our major goals today in human genetics is to provide whole sequences of humans and of other animals as well. that sequence allows to us understand more about our predisposition to disease like heart disease shown here. with about 90% accuracy if i have your d.n.c. sequence i can predict your eye color. if we had a is saliva or blood sample from a crime scene we can predict some traits with some

degree of accuracy from the d.n.a. sequence. for a long time the barrier to obtaining the sequence was cost. this slide shows the cost of first human genome sequenced in 2003. the cost all together was about $3 billion. a lot of money. but, if you think of what we spend on healthcare every day in this country, that is about ten hours of healthcare spending. that helps to put it in perspective. a few years later in 2007 a second genome was sequenced still at a cost of $100 million. when we started sequencing human genomes in 2009 the cost had come down to $25,000 because of technological developments. last year it was down to $3,000 maybe $4,000 to sequence an entire 3 billion base genome. that represents a million-fold decline in price in less than a decade. and i don't think there is any other technology that can boast that kind of a decline in cost

in so little time. now for about the cost of an m.r.i. we can get your entire d.n.a. sequence. and uplike an m.r.i. result your sequence won't change. this gives us a tremendous amount of information about each and every human who is sequenced. now tens and hundreds of thousands of people are being sequenced in various mostly biomedical studies. the very first human family to be sequenced is a family from outside. utah. it happens to be my wife and her children. we had an exercise in personal genomics that turned out to be personally fulfilling. here is the double helix and bases appearing appearing in pairs. occasionally an alteration occurs and this is what key call

a mutation. we were able to estimate the rate of mutation and how often do these actually occur? each time we reproduce we transmit 30 new mutations mutations to our offspring. most in the 99% of d.n.a. that is noncoding. it doesn't actually make proteins or structures in the body but occasionally do affect a gene so that they can actually cause disease. a great quote from lewis thomas who said the capacity to blunder slightly that is to mutate it the real marvel of d.n.a. without the special attributes we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music. that is a lovely quote. it tells us that the introduction of genetic variation allows us it to adapt to a changing environment and

gives us the wonderful diversity we see in a room full of peel like this. although they can cause disease they also allow us to adapt. we should be thanksful for them. >> the natural context is how much do we differ. if the mutations are happen happening every time we reproduce how much is there between humans? identical twins differ at essentially zero d.n.a. bases. not quite true but close enough. they are identical at the d.n. allyl. unrelated humans? do i have any guesses as to how much an unrelated pair of humans differs at the d.n.a. level. one in what? well it is not very much. one in a thousand. so at the d.n. allyl, the most fundamental unit of our biology, we are 99.9% identical.

there is an important message right there. if we compare ourselves to our nearest biological relative the chimp we are 99% identical to the chimp for d.n.a. sequencing we can line up and compare. we are more different from mice and thank goodness if you compare us to broccoli we are mostly different from broccoli at the d.n.a. level. but if you think about it, we have three billion d.n.a. bases even if we are 99.9% identical that means there are three million differences on average between each pair of humans. that is important because that provides a basis for forensic identification. each of us is genetically unique unless we are an identical twin. there are roughly three to four

million differences between individuals. that means there are at least two to the three million's power possible combinations of these differences. in other words, assuring assuring that all of us are genetically unique. the imcoition is if enough genetic variation is tested each of us could be uniquely identified and we don't need to look at every difference, just a subset of those differences. d.n.a. is found in almost all cells of the body. blood, semen. hair. even quietesten in fingerprints we can get sufficient d.n.a. for analysis. that means the d.n.a. from an evidencery sample can be matched and compared with d.n.a. of a suspect either to implicate or exonerate that person. that is what i will be talking about now for the next several minutes. we have some celebrated examples of d.n.a. identification.

when saddam hussein was first capture one of the questions was, was this really saddam or a decoy? d.n.a. had been extracted from his two sons earlier this year and that d.n.a. profile was created from the suspected saddam compared to his two sons and there was a match between the sons and saddam for a number of d.n.a. locations, helping to prove that that was in fact saddam hussein. just last month this article was published where the last victim of the boston strangler d.n.a. was identified on the victim who could be traced to a family member to albert desalvo, the man accused of being the boston strangler. but he was killed in prison before he was tried on those charge is. this famous example. may i have blue dress.

the one on which a d.n.a. sample turned a he said/she said case into a presidential impeachment. d.n.a. evidence has sevenned a number of important roles in high profile cases and in every day crime as well. i will talk more about that. what are we looking at when we try to identify people from their d.n.a.? we use something called a short tandem repeat. i'm illustrating that here. here is part of a sequence. part of the sequence, c.a.g.a. is repeated over and over again. that is why it is called a tandem repeat and it is a short one, it is only four bases. these repeats tend to bury in their number from individual to individual. -- vary in their number have individual to individual. on the copy of chromosome five that i got from my mother i might have five repeats.

on the copy from my mother i might have two. if f. you compared hank's d.n.a. and mine you would be able to tell them apart based on the number of the repeats at a specific location in the genome. and here are some specific locations. these are the 13 13 combined d.n.a. index system. short tandem repeats typically used in forensic locations. on different chromosomes. that is an important property. we'll talk about that in a minute. suppose that we wanted to look at a couple of these. we can label them with a blue and a green label here. and then what we have to do is make lots of copies of just that little piece of the chromosome that has the repeat in it. we use a technique called p.c.r.

to do that. sort of our steer red sox machine for d.n.a. what we do is take d.n.a. from any individual, load it into the p.c.r. machine and what comes out are d.n.a. fragments just the ones of interest. just the ones that contain the repeat we want to examine. an important plea from individual to individual. sizes of those fragrances are going to be different in length because of this variation in the short tan temperature tandem repeat number. we use a process called electropoheihesis. we take products from five individuals and load them into a fell like this. we apply an electrical current it the gel and what happens is that the shorter smaller fragments, the ones that have fewer repeats tend to migrate

through the gel more quickly. if they are taller they can significanted through. longer takes them longer to get through the gel. two sift rent occasions so these are two different. a lot of variation from individual to individual in the pattern of these s.t.r. lynches. let's take an example. here we have several d.n.a. samples we will load into a gel. the victim's d.n.a. evidencery sample and three suspects. we will look at four different s.t.r.'s. me might find that suspect one left d.n.a. or suspect two or suspect three. none left retrievable d.n.a. at the crime scene.

the late da could be in conclusive. we tack from from three suspects we load them into the gel. those are the p.c.r. rods products up here. we let them run and look at patterns. does anyone see a match here between the evidencery sample and any of the suspects? shout out in you see which suspect matches the evidencery sam. >> number one! >> that is exactly right. ma is what we do look for a pattern match between the evidencery sample and any one of the suspects. if you were looking at a crime lab report now you would get something that looks like this and this is essentially what i justitiad you turnedden its said. and this --ary peak.

lacking at ten difficult rent s.t.r.'s all at once. an evidencery sample, a suspect sample. this what weigh lack at are the examples further peaks. d.n.a. sequence h 16 hear ander that. is this a match are in the? in the a match. an exclusion. taste are in tough lecations. this was a case this was talley may first d.n.a. case. years ago, makele is the amakele is the was acaused in a high pressure said case in new york city. there was in d.n.a. evidence. he was identified ultimately that you a finger sprinten a piece of duct tape. he was accused of the rape of two 14-year-old girls. there were sea men samples from the rapes. the question was december the d.n.a. from the evidencery

sample match the suspect. is at that tame the krame lab was us a -- crime lab was us aing a tandem rae peat. the same principles aplay here. what we have led weigh have the defendant and then telesamples from the evidence which sample loaded at the highest concentration. here is the pattern in the defendant. here is the pattern in the evidencery sample. is this a match or not? what to you think? >> i see some heads noting. and this was by the criteria established at the time a match. is this sufficient to put him in jail? to convict him?

we have to ask how often would this profile be in the general population. we estimated that the frequency in the population of european ancestry is about one in 50. usual evidence but certainly not convincing enough to establish the identity of that evidencery sample. we look at another repeat system at another chrome comb location. here is the defendant. evidencery sample. is that a match or not? yeah, it is a match. so again we ask how frequent is this profile in the general population in our reference population? it is about one in 70. now we have two pieces of information. one with the frequency of 1-150 in general population and another with a frequency of 1-70. we can take those two pieces of information and multiply them

together so see is the likelihood that someone has both this profile as well as the other profile. 1/50 1/70. 1-3500. now we have more information. we looked at a third system. there was again a match. the estimated frequency of that profile was one in 90. a fourth system. again showed a match. and in this casele suggestion suspect got the same tandem repeat from both of thinks parents. now we can take all four of the frequencies and multiply them together and say how often would someone in the general population have the first profile, the second one, the third one and the fourth one and that turned out to be with one in three million. this was early on, the crime lab was using four of the systems but this give us an overall

probability of someone else in the population having the profile of one in three million. that along with other evidence in the case was sufficient to convict the defendant of the rapes of the two teenaged girls. he was also convicted of the homicide and now serving a sentence of life in parole -- life in prison without the possibility of parole. this just shows several cases that i have been involved in over the years. a year after the decorzo case. this was the multiple rape case. jason higgins was accused of the rapes of eight women in ogden utah. by then the crime lab had five of the tan temperature repeats in the reference population to look at five. at that point, the probability that someone else had that same d.n.a. profile had gone to 1 in 400 million just with the addition of an extra system.

by 1999 using the p.c.r. based that i talked about. a rape case and in that case with nine of the systems putting all of that information together, we had a random match probability of one in 215 billion. win of the questions that the prosecutor asked after that, after i presented that figure was and how many people are there on the face of the earth and that gives the jury the idea that it is pettily unlikely that anyone else would have that same profile. the important thing here is the pattern that we see as we incorporate more information the probabilities tend to get smaller and smaller. in this case the defendant was a member of the ojibcwa population so conservative estimates had to be used in estimating the probability. get down to small probabilities here in the case of the world's most famous navy blue dress. the random match probability was

one in eight trillion. dba evidence can be used not only to implicate the guilty it can also be used to exonerate the innocent. i worked on a case where bruce goodman had been accused of the murder of a former girlfriend. he spent 19 years in prison. his y chromosome d.n.a. was examined and it was an exclusion. as of this month, 300 convicted americans have been exonerated by this kind of post-conviction d.n.a. testing. interesting that on average they have spent 13 1/2 years years in prison. 18 received the death penalty and in about half of the cases not only did d.n.a. evidence exclude them, it identified the actual perpetrator d.n.a. is not

magic. it can be altered. it can be inaccurate. the kinds of questions that we have to address are a chain of custody, was there potential for d.n.a. contamination. were the data analyzed appropriately? interpreted accurately? the reference population where we get those frequency estimates is that the appropriate population? is it sufficiently matched for ancestral background. and another important question. is the expert witness really an expert in the area under consideration? so today d.n.a. evidence is used routinely in tens of thousands of criminal cases every year. the codus database now contains d.n.a. profiles of more than 12 million americans. most convicted offenders but also arrestees in the database. people involved in missing

persons investigations and so forth. from the database something that is fairly controversial trolling the database when you have an evidencery sample to see if anybody in the database matches it and has been used now in more than 200,000 criminal investigations. so the use of this kind of evidence is becoming increasingly common even in, for example, every day property theft, burglaries, dna testing is sometimes used at a post of $1,000 to $2,000 per case. a number of interesting ongoing developments in the field. it is possible to estimate at least approximately the and ancestry. another controversial areand a lieused in a item of the investigations now. take the d.n.a. sample and try to figure out the ethnic background of the person who

contributed it. we can as i mentioned earlier predict certain physical features. there is a specific gene called mc 1 r where i can look at three variants and i can find, i can detect about 90% of people who have red hair. this is times referred to as the red hair gene. we can predict eye color accurately in 90% of cases. we can even with a blood example estimate age. it is approximate but can give us some idea of the age of the contributor of the blood example. and people are working on rapid detection and d.n.a. typing at the crime scene. a lot of interesting developments. developments that involve both science as well as i think the legal profession helping to decide which of these developments are appropriate. how can we best use them.

caller: one the things i enjoy about talking to groups of judges is you have this group has the collective wisdom to figure out how to use this information to its best possible purposes and, of course, to avoid any potential harmful outcomes. i would like that thank you for your attention this morning and i would be happy to address any question is. [ applause ] >> we have time for two or three questions. please come up to the microphones in front. and remember, you will be immortalized on c-span. >> when you take swabs and tell you where you came from and what your future possibility medical problems are. how accurate are those predictions and is it worth the money? >> a great question. the question was what so-called direct to consumer testing where

you send a saliva sample in to a company and they type your d.n.a. using what we call a d.n.a. chip and you get back a lot of information. information about your approximate ancestry and about your risk for a number of disease conditions. it is important that the companies always refer to this as recreational gene genomics. they don't claim it has accurate accuracy for biopurposes. they give, i did send my saliva off and it was interesting to get the ruts back. the charge at that time was $400 and i believe some now are down to $100. if you take with a large grain

of salt it is kind of pun. where it gets problematic is with the diseases we are most interested in. things like diabetes and heart disease and common cancers because they will give you some risk information for those conditions. the problem is we in the genetics community haven't identified the genetic causes of those diseases. we will have gotten very different risk results. depending on which particular tests those happen to be used. i would take it with a grain of salt. it as lot of fun but ultimately it is recreational. >> sometimes in criminal cases there is accusations when you collect a sample from a suspect that that is the sample that somehow is again taken and is claimed to be the evidence

sample. my question is, is there a difference between -- are you going to find a difference between the evidence sample and the collected sample? and if there really was too much similarity would that be a suggestion that there actually has been some con tam nation of the collective sample with the supposed evidence sample? >> okay. so the question was if you are cop pairing an evidencery sample collected at the crime scene with the sample you have taken from a suspect could there be suspiciously too great a resemblance between them upthat that. >> yes. >> type typically when we see a match, if all 13 of the core s.t.r.'s are successfully tight all 13 are going to match and that would not that is not

really a sur price. what is really important here is very accurate accounting of the chain of custody, the whole sequence of collection events and there have been contamination issues sometimes due to lab errors. sometimes because of cross contamination at the crime scene. there are cases where the d.n.a. evidence turned out to be correct times because of misinterpretation of results. the rate in general is very low but it has been known to happen. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute] >> you will have another chance. we will have a half hour of q&a with the entire panel at the end of the overall session. the next speaker, shannon novak is on her way up. we are moving from genetics to anthropology but staying in the area of forensics.

shannon will talk about her area of great expertise what we can learn from bones and other remains. as soon as we find the right powerpoint. excellent. >> thank you to the organize hes for inviting me to speak today. i think i am the anthropology of this section. everybody else is talking about d.n.a. i'm delighted to be here. and what i want to do is use the wonderful setup that lynn jorde gave us of the genome and gee genotype. the amazing code that manifests in such interesting ways. then let's move out in scale to actual bodies putting the genes

into bodies and the interface between the gene, the genotype and pheno type and what we see and how they express themselves as they interface with the environment. as they interface with individuals' behavior. and with historical changes over time. >> professor jorde talked about we may have a gene that we can predict hair color or eye color. there is so much that we don't understand about those genes and how they come to express themselves and this takes us into the toe main domain of anthropology and trying to put the genes into bodies that have a long evolutionary history and looking at them across space and through

time. so again anthropology, this wonderful discipline that allows us to not only consider cultural behaviors, but the physical environment and the physical body itself and how that has changed over time and across space. the core of anthropology is one of comparison and looking at variation. again, across time and space. so what you will see is we will move from different biogee ogwumikebiogeographies and through deep time to look at the changes that have taken place. i'm sorry. to be able to move deep times

and we are talking maybe two three, six million years ago we can't study those soft tissues and those bodies we see around us. although the genome is helping us understand deep time. so what we do is we turn to the skeleton and human remains. many of us that are biological anthropologists study human remains, the hardish hard tissue that is left over and there are a variety of different sub disciplines, pal you anthropology or paleon tolling are looking at deep time and bits of bone and what it can tell us about our extinct ancestors. what they ate and how they intacted with their environment but also the relationship between each other. more recent work on skeletal remains and recent history dealing with anatomically

moderns in archaeology. is what he trained in. i was interested in a small group that lived in the great basin about a thousand years ago and i was interested in the peeples that lived around the margins of this complex society the anasati and what it was like to live in this countryside and the interactions in particular between groups and within households. i was particularly interested in gender relations and in collective violence between groups. physical and though polling in dealing with soft tissue and living people and looking at how just how are our modern environment and how that is affecting growth. the changes in the phenotype pulpit they are still interested

in the underlying skeletons. people have been called in to tore ren sick work more recently in particular to look at age in individuals that may be involved in immigration and deportation issues. that type is interesting. and then what we are here today for, for rensis. forensics. this is a new little category on the chart. i have been using this lovely chart to teach for years and years and for forensics has been added to the chart. in part it has been due in part to the popular culture. obviously bones and all of the crime shows on television. but also current events. and hearing about mass graves and the analysis of these remains that are coming from mass conflict have started to make their way into the public

perception of the kind of work we do behind the scenes. what so what is forensic anthropology? and you probably get a different definition from all forensic anthropologists because they haven't quite decided on what they are yet. it as new sub discipline within physical anthropology. and they are trying to carve out a niche for themselves. folks that specialize in just dealing with medical legal issues. in contemporary events.